1. Field
The present disclosure relates generally to processing data and to a method and apparatus for data compression. Still more particularly, the present disclosure relates to a method and apparatus to reduce an amount of three dimensional data to be stored or transmitted by transforming the three dimensional data from a first coordinate system to a plurality of metadata based on a second coordinate system and configured for one or more applications by one or more attributes in each of the plurality of metadata.
2. Background
Manned and unmanned vehicles may be aerial or ground vehicles. Both manned and unmanned vehicles are used as platforms for devices that gather data. Manned vehicles are normally larger than unmanned vehicles. Therefore, manned vehicles normally are configured to carry more hardware for capturing, storing, and sending data. Unmanned vehicles are advantageous for data gathering for a number of reasons. One of the reasons unmanned vehicles are advantageous for data gathering is that they can operate for long periods of time, and during such long periods of time continuously acquire data. Because the amount of data acquired over a long period of time is large, both storage and transmission of the data use increased amounts of resources in physical storage, transmission bandwidth, and central processing unit time.
One type of data acquired by both manned and unmanned vehicles is three dimensional data from a three dimensional imaging system. An example of a three dimensional imaging system is a light detection and ranging (LIDAR) system that measures distance, speed, rotation, chemical composition and concentration of a remote target. The remote target may be a clearly defined object, such as a vehicle, or a diffuse object such as a smoke plume or cloud. LIDAR imaging systems gather extremely large amounts of data. LIDAR data is known as point cloud data. Point cloud data represents individual points of light reflected from spatial surfaces of objects scanned by the LIDAR imaging system, each individual point of light having a three dimensional coordinate. Because of the amount of data acquired by a platform employing a LIDAR system, challenges arise in both transmission and storage for processing of the data.
Accordingly, it would be advantageous to have a method and apparatus which takes into account one or more of the issues discussed above as well as possibly other issues.